CHAPTER XVIII—CROSS-PURPOSES

IN the task of arranging her roses in the various bowls and vases Baines had set in readiness for her, Jean found a certain relief from the feeling of terror which had invaded her. Something in the homely everydayness of the occupation served to relax the tension of her mind, keyed up and overwrought by the stress of her interview with Burke, and it was with almost her usual composure of manner that she greeted Blaise when presently he joined her.

“I’ve raided the rose garden to-day,” she said, smilingly indicating the mass of scented blossom that lay heaped up on the table. “I expect when Johns finds out he will proceed to meditate upon something for my benefit with boiling oil in it.”

Johns was one of the gardeners to whom Jean’s joyous and wholesale robbery of his first-fruits was a daily cross and affliction. Only chloroform would ever have reconciled him to the cutting off of a solitary bloom while still in its prime.

Blaise regarded the tangle of roses consideringly.

“I wonder you found time to gather so many. When I passed by the rose garden, you were—otherwise occupied.” The quietly uttered comment sent the blood rushing up into Jean’s face. When had he passed? What had he seen?

She kept her eyes lowered, seemingly intent upon the disposition of some exquisite La France roses in a black Wedge-wood bowl.

“What do you mean?” she asked negligently.

Tormarin was silent a moment.

Had she looked at him she would have surprised a restless pain in the keen eyes he bent upon her.

“Jean”—he spoke very gently—“have I—to congratulate you?”

It was difficult to preserve her poise of indifference when the man she loved put this question to her, but she contrived it somehow. Women become adepts in the art of hiding their feelings. The conventions demand it of them.

Jean’s answer fluttered out with the airy lightness of a butterfly in the sunshine.

“I am sure I can’t say, unless you tell me upon what grounds?”

“You know of none, then”—swiftly.

“None.”

She nibbled the end of a stalk and surveyed the Wedge-wood bowl critically. Tormarin felt like shaking her.

“Then,” he said gruffly, “let me suggest you revise your methods. The women who plays with Geoffrey Burke might as safely play with an unexploded bomb.”

His voice betrayed him, revealing the personal element behind the proffered counsel.

Jean glanced at him between her lashes. So that was it! He was jealous—jealous of Burke! At last something had happened to pierce the joints of his armour of assumed indifference! Her heart sang a little p忙an of thanksgiving, and all that was woman in her rose bubbling to meet the situation. In an instant she had recaptured her aplomb.

“I think I rather enjoy playing with unexploded bombs,” she returned meditatively. “There are always—possibilities—about them.”

“There are”—grimly. “And it is precisely against those possibilities that I am warning you.”

“Don’t you think it’s rather bad taste on your part to warn me against a man who is admittedly on terms of friendship with you all?”

“No, I don’t”—steadily. “Nor should I care if it were. When it’s a matter of you and your safety, the question of taste doesn’t enter into the thing at all.”

“My safety?” jeered Jean softly. (It was barely half an hour since Burke had inspired her with that sudden fear of him and of his compelling personality!)

“Well, if not your safety, at least your happiness,” amended Blaise.

“It’s very kind of you to interest yourself, but really my happiness has nothing whatever to do with Geoffrey Burke.”

“Is that true?”

He flashed the question at her, and there was that in his tone which set her pulses athrill, quenching the light-hearted spirit of banter that had led her to torment him. It was the note of restrained passion which she had heard before in his voice, and which had always power to move her to the depths of her being.

“Perfectly true.” She faltered a little. “But”—forcing herself to a defiance that was in reality a species of self-defence—“I fail to see that it concerns you, Blaise.”

“It concerns me in so far as Burke is not the sort of man that a woman can make a friend of. It’s all or nothing with him. And if you don’t intend to give him all, you’d better give him—nothing.”

His glance, grave and steady, met hers, and she knew then, of a certainty, that he had witnessed the scene which had taken place in the rose garden, when Burke had held her in his arms and the flood of his passion had risen and overwhelmed her. He had witnessed that—and had misunderstood it.

She was conscious of a fierce resentment against him. It mattered nothing to her that, in the light of her nonchalant answers to his questions, he was fully justified in the obvious conclusion he had drawn. She did not stop to think whether her anger was reasonable or unreasonable. She was simply furious with him for suspecting her of flirting—odious word!—with Geoffrey Burke. Well, if he chose to think thus of her, let him do so! She would not trouble to explain—to exculpate herself.

She regarded him with stormy eyes.

“Please understand, Blaise, that I want neither your advice nor your criticism. If I choose to make a friend of Geoffrey Burke—or of any other man—I shall do so without asking your permission or approval. What I do, or don’t do, is no business of yours.”

For a moment they faced each other, his eyes, stormy as her own, dark with anger. His hands clenched themselves.

“If I could,” he said hoarsely, “I would make it my business.”

He wheeled round and left the room without another word. Jean stood staring dazedly at the blank panels of the door which had closed behind him. She wanted to laugh... or to cry. To laugh, because with every sullen word he revealed the thing he was so sedulously intent on keeping from her. To cry, because he had taken her pretended indifference at its face value, and so another film of misunderstanding had risen to thicken the veil between them—the veil which he would not, and she, being a woman, could not, draw aside.